“Please,” I said. “No one. I’m not working for—”

Aaqila pushed me back again and I screamed. The towel covered my face again. I tried to suck in air but the water came too fast. I couldn’t breathe.

My mind began to shut down like a city under a blackout, whole neighborhoods going offline. My consciousness coalesced around a single thought: I am going to die.

And then, light.

*   *   *

The towels covering my face burned away like flash paper. Dr. Gloria stood over me, her wings stretched impossibly long, filling the room with coruscating light. In her right hand she held a flaming sword—eight feet long, the flames trembling at the edge of the silver—and in her left she held her clipboard, the text upon it shivering with meaning.

“Thank God,” I said.

I could not see Fayza or Aaqila. Her brilliance masked the rest of the room.

“Keep your eyes on me,” Dr. Gloria said. Her wings snapped like white sails. I focused on her face, and the flames reflected in the lenses of her eyeglasses. The wings sealed off the world behind a curtain of alabaster.

My chest ached with relief, and shame. Oh, I was crazy. Deep crazy. Dr. Gloria did not exist, but I was so relieved to see her.

“We are not reconciled,” the angel said. “I still don’t approve of the way you’re treating Ollie. She’s fragile, and you’re using her.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right. I promise I’ll—”

“Oh please,” Dr. G said. “You’re in a terrible state yourself. I’m not going to extract promises from you in this situation—that would make me as bad as these waterboarding Afghan bitches.” She shook her head. “I blame the Americans for this.”

We seemed to be talking in a bubble of frozen time. We weren’t. The brain cannot stop the clock, or even slow it. The mind cannot, despite Roger Penrose’s cockamamie quantum theories, access a timeless, platonic realm of pure thought. The brain can’t even process data faster when under duress. That moment you slipped off the garage roof, and you seemed to hang in the air forever; that first kiss, when the planet shrieked to a halt and your heart composed symphonies between heartbeats; that endless, jellied moment you spent in the glare of the truck lights, your life scrolling past you?

All illusions. We only remember some moments as lasting forever, because when we are frightened or thrilled the amygdala stamps every last detail with emotion, marking it as vital, worthy of instant retrieval. Our ancient ancestors could forget a thousand days of gathering berries, but remembering every detail of the saber-tooth’s attack was worth its weight in evolutionary gold. Only when we recall that moment (days or even seconds later) does it seem to have happened in slow motion. The huge volume of data messes with the brain’s rule of thumb (and when it comes to math, the brain is all thumbs): X Amount of Sensory Memory = Y Amount of Time.

I knew all that. But I also knew that under the shelter of Dr. Gloria’s wings, I experienced not just grace but a grace period, and I was thankful for it.

The doctor said to me, “I can get you out of this. But you’re going to have to say exactly what I tell you—and with conviction.”

“How? What are you going to say?”

“Do you trust me, Lyda?”

Of course I did. More than I trusted myself. “Just stay with me,” I said.

“That’s the spirit.” She tucked the sword away—into whatever nonexistent scabbard holds imaginary swords—and folded her wings around my head. The black was gone now; I saw white and only white. Her feathers were soft and dry.

Aaqila pulled me up again. The room was the same, except that now Dr. Gloria stood at my right side.

I coughed water for almost a minute, my chest heaving. Fayza grew impatient. “Get a hold of yourself,” she said.

The angel bent and whispered into my ear. Then I said the words she had given me: “I can get you a sample.”

“You said you didn’t have one,” Fayza said.

Gloria whispered again, and I said, “I don’t—but I know where to get it.” I coughed again, a grating bark of lungs trying to expel the last of the liquid. Aaqila handed me another towel.

“I know who sold it to the pastor,” I said. “And I’ve set up a deal to get my own.”

“Go on,” Fayza said.

“After the church—the church I went to with Hootan—I realized that the wafers weren’t the delivery system.” I coughed into the towel, a distraction that allowed time for Gloria to speak to me. “I didn’t have to send them off for testing, because I just swallowed them. I figured I could stand the dose. And they were nothing. No effect.”

The lie was delivered with all the physiological sincerity I could muster. Racked by the aftereffects of the drowning, it was easy to let my voice break with emotion, to allow my body to adopt the bent and heaving attitude of the penitent. The rest of the lie depended on Fayza not being the one who killed the pastor and Luke. If she was lying about that, then I was a dead woman.

Gloria nodded approvingly. “Keep going,” she said.

“The next night I went back to the church,” I said. “I broke in the back door. That’s when I discovered that Rudy and Luke had been killed.”

Fayza said, “You weren’t going to tell me this?”

I looked up at her. I didn’t have to force new tears. “I thought you had killed them. And I was sure I was next.”

Aaqila said something under her breath. Fayza ignored her and asked, “If they were dead, how did you find out where they got the drug?”

“They had a chemjet printer hidden in the bathroom. All the c-packs had been taken—I assumed you’d gotten your sample. But there was something else in the room I couldn’t figure out at first. Cigarettes. Boxes of them. Wrapped in plastic, no cartons.”

Dr. G placed a cool hand on my shoulder. “Let her get there.”

Fayza frowned. “He was getting it from the Indians.”

I nodded, and listened to Gloria. “I have a friend of mine, somebody I met in the hospital, who used to do a lot of business with the Six Nations. She knows the people who run the smoke shacks. She said they smuggled all kinds of things, not just cigarettes. She reached out to them, and we met them tonight to set up a buy.”

“For what?” Fayza asked.

“The whole thing. A new chemjet, and a full set of ingredient packs.”

“And you are receiving these when?”

“Tomorrow night. In Cornwall.”

Dr. Gloria said, “Here is where we make her part of the solution.” She told me what to say next, and I almost rebelled. “Trust me,” Gloria said.

Fortunately, my hesitation could be interpreted as shame. “There’s only one problem,” I said. “They want forty-thousand Yuan.”

“And you don’t have this money?”

I shook my head. It felt so heavy from the water. “Not yet.”

Fayza leaned in, squinting, as if she didn’t hear me correctly: one of the library of power moves that adults used to signal that other adults were fucking idiots. “You arranged to buy from these people,” she said, “and you don’t have the money?”

“I was going to call everyone I knew,” I said. “Uncles, cousins, old friends. Open credit lines. Go in with loan sharks if I had to.”

“Unbelievable,” Fayza said. She walked away from me, thinking. After thirty seconds of silence she turned and said, “Hootan and Aaqila will go with you. And if you’re lying, they will kill you. You know this to be true, yes?”

Aaqila stared at me. She seemed to be already imagining it.

“I understand,” I said. I didn’t need any prompting from Gloria.

“Good,” Fayza said. “Until we leave, you’ll be staying with Aaqila.”

“What? No. I’m not—”

“Do not press me, Lyda.”

Dr. Gloria bristled. “We are so going to smite her ass,” she said. “At the first Goddamn opportunity.”

My angel. My protector. Keeper of my rage.

*   *   *

Aaqila lived in one of the two-story houses on Tyndall Avenue. The drive over in Hootan’s car was ridiculously short, like a golf cart ride from green to tee. Hootan didn’t have time to ask about my wet hair or what had happened inside the salon. Or maybe he didn’t dare; he seemed in awe of Aaqila, or maybe infatuated with her. Aaqila barely acknowledged him.